Thursday, April 26, 2012

The transition is happening but not nearly fast enough to save the soon-to-be-new-front-month June futures.
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

If there ever was a king of coal-fired electricity, it was Southern Co.

The Atlanta-based utility, the owner of Georgia Power and three other
Southeast utilities, got 70 percent of its electricity from coal-fired
power plants as recently as five years ago. Only 16 percent of
Southern’s power came from natural gas then.

Now, environmental mandates and cheap natural gas prices
have led to a dramatic shift in Southern’s energy mix: This year the
utility will get 47 percent of its fuel from natural gas and 35 percent
from coal, Chief Executive Tom Fanning said.

“We’ve cut coal in half,” Fanning told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The amount of natural gas that Southern buys now accounts for more
than 2 percent of U.S. natural gas consumption, making the company the
third-largest user of natural gas in the utility industry behind South
Florida’s NextEra Energy and Calpine, based in Houston. Southern serves a
territory that is slightly smaller than the entire country of
Australia....MORE